Not the Mountain Kind

They broke down in the thick hot air on the side of the highway in Arkansas. It was a big old boat of a Buick, deer tan. Leroy had bought it for $100 and then rebuilt the engine. He couldn’t read, but when he closed his eyes he could trace the workings of an engine from start to finish in his mind. His old lady was asleep, swollen and pregnant with his first child in the passenger seat.

Rachel Garringer lives a stone’s throw from the sheep farm where she was raised in southeastern West Virginia. When not writing fiction she works as a youth advocate, interviews rural and small town LGBTQI folks for an oral history project called Country Queers, and spends as much time as possible out in the garden and the woods. “Vultures,” which appeared in the Fall 2013 issue of Still: The Journal, was her first published work.